Corporate Social Networking

A few days ago, I read an interesting article in my local newspaper that I found surprisingly relevant to the sort of stuff we talk about here. I say surprisingly, because I find web development is still a pretty esoteric field; in fact, the majority of my friends don't have the first clue as to what I'm talking about when they read my articles, or even most of my blog posts.

So I was quite taken aback when I saw an article about corporate social networking on the front cover of the business section of my daily paper. I believe that this fact alone is news in itself. It's an indication that the social networking phenomenon is gaining enough momentum to be visible in mainstream media. Furthermore, the article doesn't talk about social networking in general -- it focuses on the corporate aspect of the concept. In other words, it's about people who use social networking more for career development than for recreation.

Plugging in (to the network)

OK, so the idea's a good one -- let's see how it actually works. The two sites that the article mentions are Linkedin and XING. The registration for both is fairly standard; the main difference is that work information is required for both sites. This is expected as you are effectively defined by what you do and who you work for, as far as this site is concerned. Linkedin adds an extra feature where it runs an ActiveX control that connects to your Outlook e-mail client, grabbing your address book contacts and doing a search against their database. However, there's not much need to worry, as it allows you to choose who you want in your network before adding them. It didn't seem to work for me though, maybe because I use Outlook Express.

Besides elaborating your profile, there really isn't much you can do on the site for free. With Linkedin, I was actually able to find some people I know, and even some information about them that I hadn't known previously. With Xing, you can't even get details on any of the results that were returned (if you're lucky, you might see a tiny picture of them in the leftmost column).

Dishing out (the cash)

Let's face it. We're not really here to advertise ourselves (we can use the job search sites for that). These are social networking sites, and we're here to socially network. So what do we have to pay to get this functionality?

Linkedin has the higher prices, which range from $19.95 to $200 per month (as of this posting). Although the high-end option may seem pricey, it may be a very reasonable cost for B2B companies that rely on Linkedin to generate most of their sales leads. On the other hand, XING has only one level of paid service, at 5.95 euro per month. XING also appears to have fewer users, although this is only based on my ad hoc observations, and may not be true for all industries or geographic locations.

Both Linkedin and XING function on a similar principle: there are two ways you can connect with others on the site. First, you can either request to be connected with someone in the same company as one of your contacts ("introductions" in Linkedin and "contact requests" in Xing), or you can send unsolicited messages to a person you wish to have as a contact ("InMail" in Linkedln and just "mail" in XING). As you'd expect, it's these unsolicited mail messages that are the most limited (for the basic plan, Linkedin allows only 3 per month).

Summing up (my impression)

I haven't made a financial commitment yet, so I can't attest to either site's functionality. However, I believe that the trend is definitely here to stay, and I'll even go so far as to speculate that we'll see the standard online job sites like Monster and Workopolis begin to integrate this kind of approach. Even if you're not looking for a job, it can help your career in many other ways. For example, you can get your friends to work at your company! Remember, it's not what you know, it's who you know (that's a cliché, but a true one).